Meteorite falls on fertile soil of modern phobias

The Chelyabinsk meteorite not only caused millions in damage and injured over a thousand of people, but it also awoke a new phobia in people’s minds. The Ogoniok magazine correspondents investigate panics of historical epochs, trends in mass hysteria, and the role of technology and mass media in stirring our fears.

Few people know that the Chelyabinsk meteorite exploded
exactly 100 years after another unique astronomical event, with a slight
difference in six days: the Great Procession of Meteors in 1913 raced a dozen
meteorites by the sky of the northern hemisphere on Feb. 9; the Chelyabinsk meteorite
exploded on Feb. 15.

In 1913, Russian journalists asked writers and artists of
St. Petersburg to talk about what they were most afraid of, later publishing a
special “terrifying” issue on their findings. A real encyclopedia of phobias
from the beginning of the 20th century was thus released: the
artists painted demons and devils, and the writers wrote stories about the evil
ghosts.

Remarkably, the magazine did not mention a single word about the coming
revolution and war, or a worldwide catastrophe of any sort. Hence, at the
beginning of the last century, science had inspired the people to peace of
mind, but all kinds of mysticism still conjured up fear of the
incomprehensible.

Today, the situation seems to have flipped completely:
vampires and other creatures have become teenagers’ idols, while advances in
science have come to instill genuine horror in humanity. It turns out that,
with the expansion of our knowledge about the world, the list of threats has
expanded.

An average person with an ordinary education is simply unable to
formulate many of these threats; still, the average person recognizes when
something is frightening. Just remember the mass hysteria around the launch of
the Large Hadron Collider, or the expectations of a global climate catastrophe
to accompany the end of the world as calculated by the Mayans.

Even
nanotechnology, which was promoted five years ago by the current Russian prime
minister, seemed a mysterious source of evil that destroys living organisms at
the molecular level.

Hence, the Chelyabinsk meteorite fell on well-prepared
soil.

Technological progress has also played its role. If
anything like this had happened in the Soviet era, no one would have paid
attention to the explosion in the atmosphere. In fact, this is exactly what
happened in July 1949, when another meteorite exploded in the sky over
Chelyabinsk: the newspapers printed a small article, and residents skimmed over
it and immediately forgot about it.

Or, for example, does anyone remember the
bolide explosion 15 years ago in the skies over Siberia? The power of the
explosion was equal to 20 of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki.

Meanwhile, there is no doubt that the recent Chelyabinsk
explosion will be remembered for a long time, thanks to video recorders that
shot the blast in all possible ways. The recordings hit the Internet, there
were jokes and collages made about the meteorite, and then, one by one,
"conspiracy theories" about the explosion were born.

"Why did
the meteorite leave a tail similar to the missile fuel tail?” a national
newspaper asked. "Why was the meteorite explosion similar to missile
self-destruction?"

Soon, those in government corridors started to talk
about creating a new anti-meteorite defense.

Related:

Now, frightened people do not accept the arguments of
scientists, who say that, in principle, we cannot control 90 percent of the
asteroids and comets passing close by us. Here are some figures: each month in
the Earth's atmosphere, medium-sized bolides explode with energies up to 300 tons
of TNT.

Every 10 years, meteorites slam the planet's atmosphere with the energy
of 50 kilotons of TNT. However, objects like an asteroid or the Tunguska
meteorite visit us once in a millennium.

According to Hakob Nazaretyan, the chief researcher of the Oriental
Studies Institute and an expert on psychology of the masses, the formation of a
"panic crowd" is scarcely dependent on nationality and culture;
mainly it has to do with fears of an historical epoch.

In the Middle Ages, for
example, mass panic was caused by witches. Today, there are other fears — the
fear of radioactive contamination, airplane crashes, and falling asteroids. The
sources of rumors change with time: if previously they were distributed by taxi
drivers, merchants, or grandmothers, now it is the mass media that contributes
to drawing people into mass panic and hostility.

Looking at all the information noise around the meteorite,
we should ask: are we not deceived as our ancestors were 100 years ago? Maybe
we should be afraid not of rocks in the sky, but of something more real that is
already at our doorstep.

Kirill Zhurenkov, Sergey Melnikov, Vladimir Tikhomirov are the columnists for the Ogoniok magazine.

Mass hysteria of the last few years

Turn of the century

On the eve of the millennium, computer users around the
world were afraid of the so-called Y2K bug. Many were concerned that the data
in computers would just be reset when the year switched to 2000 — this could
have been critical, for example, for financial programs. In some countries,
large sums of money were put into finding the Y2K solution, even though experts
criticized the idea and argued that the issue was not worth inflating.

Swine flu

A large-scale outbreak of the disease occurred in 2009 and
led the World Health Organization (WHO) to raise the pandemic threat to the
maximum — 6 points. This was the first time the threat level had been that high
in 40 years. The whole world was in a panic. Later, when fears subsided, WHO
was accused of fanning unnecessary fears, and entire batches of purchased
vaccine remained unclaimed.

Doomsday

December 21, 2012 (or, in another version, Dec. 23) was
"assigned" to be the end of the world. The media referred to the
Mayan calendar, which is said to have ended on one of those days. Scientists,
including experts on the Mayan civilization, denied these rumors, and the end
of the world, in fact, did not come on either of those dates.